Report: 135K Ky kids have had parent in jail

Krystal Jennings figures she’d been to jail 20 times in the last three years. Mostly minor charges, she said, related to her drinking. Some not so minor. The worst part, the 28-year-old said, is the toll her repeated jailing takes on her 9-year-old son.

He struggles to make sense of her absences, she said, and has acted out in school. She knows a criminal record makes getting steady jobs and apartments difficult. And she worries about lasting trauma for her son because of a mother who is “in and out of his life.”

“It’s gotten pretty bad. He keeps up with me on Crime Times,” a publication of jail mug shots, said Jennings, a mother of three. “He misses me, and he wants to know why I can’t get it together.”

While Kentucky’s once-skyrocketing incarceration rate has leveled off in recent years, a new report highlights how deeply that has cut into the lives of children.

According to an Annie E. Casey Foundation report released Monday, a whopping 13 percent of Kentucky children – 135,000 – reported in 2011-12 that they had a parent incarcerated at some point in their lives.

That’s the highest percentage of any state, and nearly double the national average of 7 percent.

Indiana had 177,000 such children, comprising about 11 percent. Nationwide, about 5.1 million children have experienced parental incarceration, according to the report, “A Shared Sentence,” co-released by Kentucky Youth Advocates.

Terry Brooks, executive director of Kentucky Youth Advocates, said it matters because parental incarceration exacts a devastating toll on families and society at large.

“When a parent is in jail or prison, it creates an unstable environment for kids that can have lasting effects like poverty, changes in living situations, and mental and emotional health issues,” he said, yet “policy debates about incarceration rarely focus on the impact on children.”

Brooks said he hopes the report’s findings help highlight the issue: “You can’t ignore a 13-percent-of-the-population problem,” he said.

The report uses data from the 2011-12 National Survey of Children’s Health, the latest available. That was also the same time at which Kentucky enacted a slew of criminal justice reforms. The changes, including expanding alternative sentencing for nonviolent crimes, were meant to curb a prison population that had been increasing four times faster than the national average.

John Tilley, the secretary of the Kentucky Justice Cabinet who helped push those changes as a legislator, said they have helped level off the increase that some predicted could reach 27,000 by 2015. But they haven’t yet produced the decline in the prison population some predicted. State jails and prisons held about 22,700 people in April, compared to 21,500 in April 2012.

While those reforms are still in their infancy in some ways, Tilley said, some provisions, such as options for deferred prosecutions for certain drug offenders, haven’t been embraced as much as he’d like. In part that’s because communities lack resources to supervise such programs, he said.

More recently, the Kentucky legislature expanded the types of offenses that are eligible for being expunged, which is likely to help many offenders find jobs and support children upon release.

Still, overall concern about the impacts on children remain. According to the U.S. Department of Justice, Kentucky in 2014 still had a prison incarceration rate 21 percent higher than the national average, despite having a crime rate that is 15 percent below the national average.

“We have families and children who are impacted in so many ways,” he said. “I don’t believe there are enough resources.”

The Annie E. Casey Foundation report suggests policy recommendations to minimize the impacts on children, such as prioritizing placement with kin, providing support such as access to child care and expanding family counseling and parenting courses at jails and prisons.

The report found that the vast majority of the parents jailed are younger fathers, but it noted that nearly half of women in federal prison are mothers. Affected children are “typically younger and living in low-income families of color, usually with a single mother who has limited education,” it said.

About half of incarcerated parents provided primary financial support. When fathers are incarcerated, the report found, family incomes drop 22 percent. About 65 percent of families with a member in prison couldn’t meet basic needs, and one-third landed in debt.

The remaining spouse can then face child-care and work conflicts. Housing instability and risk of homelessness significantly increases, the report said.

Preston Elrod, a professor at Eastern Kentucky University’s School of Justice Studies, said high incarceration rates can be particularly pernicious when concentrated in neighborhoods where kids “are living in a world where lots of people go to jail and families are often torn apart.”

In 2014, a PBS documentary noted that in Louisville’s Beecher Terrace, a housing complex in Louisville, nearly one in six people will spend time in jail or prison – which costs the state $15 million a year.

“Having a parent incarcerated is a stressful, traumatic experience of the same magnitude as abuse, domestic violence and divorce,” the report said. Family bonds are weakened, and the stress can increase depression, anxiety and hamper academic achievement.

Judith Jennings, who helps run an art program for children making video visits to parents in the Louisville jail – the only child visits allowed – said many younger children blame themselves, much like some might do during a divorce.

That worries Jude Deason, 28, who held photos of her daughter, 2-year-old MollyMae, as she sat in jail last week on felony charges she said were related to addiction. She’s facing up to 10 years in prison, she said.

While in jail, her daughter is being cared for by her older parents, who are on fixed incomes and struggle with health problems. She worries about missed development and emotional damage, and the struggles she will face if she’s convicted.

Deason and Jennings are both taking a 12-week jail parenting program, run by Home of the Innocents, that has given them new tools to parent and reconnect with their children. But it has also underscored the potential impact.

“MollyMae is used to not knowing where her mommy is,” she said of her addiction and jailing. “I worry about emotional damage. … My biggest concern is that MollyMae is going to be me. That the cycle will repeat.”

Reporter Chris Kenning can be reached at 502-582-4697 or ckenning@courier-journal.com